Written by Lauren Bucher
Many Harding students skipped the cafeteria for a day, opting to participate in a campus-wide fast to raise awareness about stopping malnutrition with MANA from March 17-18.
In last Wednesday’s chapel led by MANA, Mother Administered Nutritive Aid, students learned that every six seconds a child dies from malnutrition, a death that is preventable. They learned about MANA’s aim: ending malnutrition.
“It begins with a day of you experiencing food insecurity,” Mark Moore, a Harding alum, former SA president, and co-founder of MANA, said. “[Fasting is] better than your money. It’s solidarity, identifying with the one-third of the world that is hungry.”
The fast began with a devotional on Wednesday night, where both Moore and Harding Bible professor Dr. Phil Thompson spoke. Thompson relayed his experiences with fasting and quoted the series in Matthew 5:16, noting that fasting is included in a list next to prayer and giving. He said that there is the assumption in the passage that Christians will fast, but the discipline tends to be overlooked in American Christians. Thompson encouraged students to find something that they depend on, ranging anything from food to electronicdistractions, and go without it for a day.
“The fast is a way for us to really sacrifice more than just giving ten dollars, buying a T-shirt or donating a Facebook status,” President of the dietetics club SaraBeth Myers said. “Identifying with the hungry in this small way makes us more passionate about fighting malnutrition.”
Neither T-shirts nor dinners were sold to support MANA because fundraising was not the primary objective. The fast was intended to engage students by being a memorable experience and a sacrifice. The purpose of sacrificing by fasting was to expand student involvement beyond dropping money in a jar.
The Dietetics Club, Student Association, Kibo Group’s Harding chapter, the Roosevelt Institute, Multicultural Student Action Committee (MSAC) and the Honors College paired with Moore to bring malnutrition awareness and MANA to Harding. Students staffed a booth Wednesday and Thursday in the student center, distributing samples of MANA and answering students’ questions. Thursday night, students broke the fast in the cafeteria with a traditional African meal.
About a billion people are suffering from hunger. Out of that billion, the children of the perpetually hungry can slip into an extreme form of malnutrition — severe acute malnutrition, which annually kills up to 2 million children.
MANA, a nutrient-loaded paste containing peanut butter, powdered milk and vitamins, reverses the self-harvesting effects of malnutrition. Several servings induce rapid weight gain, yanking children out of severe acute malnutrition, and three doses of MANA daily for six weeks bolsters children enough to prevent them from slipping back into severe malnutrition.
The program supplies mothers with MANA to feed to their children, an improvement on the traditional malnutrition treatment, which required a hospital stay. With home treatment, families avoid the burden of time and money that a long hospital stay requires. An added benefit of home treatment is that the children avoid contracting additional sickness from malnutrition wards. Staying in the hospital can be deadly because the children have weakened immune systems, which allow disease to spread more quickly between them.
MANA is a ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF); RUFTs are the endorsed standard for malnutrition treatment and have been since 2007. MANA has a shelf-life of 2 years, requires no refrigeration, is prepackaged and can be manufactured cheaply and locally. Additionally, malnourished children can digest it better than grains and feed the paste to themselves.
Peanut-based RUTFs, like MANA, are the new and improved malnutrition treatment and work better than the previous practice of distributing powdered milk formulas. Milk-based malnutrition treatments proved impractical as they require clean water, are not pre-mixed and will curdle quickly without refrigeration.
“Ultimately, the main purpose [of the fast] was to share what MANA is about,” Myers said. “They need support and for people to believe in them. Malnutrition can be a thing of the past. This is the first time I’ve felt that it’s conquerable in a large-scale way.”
Students can learn more about MANA from their Web site, www.mananutrition.org or by becoming a fan on Facebook.
